Amazon QuickSight makes it easy for all employees within a company – regardless of their technical skill – to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company has announced that Amazon QuickSight is now available to all customers. More than 1,500 AWS customers, including global enterprises and startups from a range of industries, have been using Amazon QuickSight during its preview. These customers have experienced how seamlessly Amazon QuickSight connects to AWS and non-AWS data sources, and how fast the query performance is for its robust Super-fast, Parallel, In-Memory Calculation Engine (called SPICE). Pricing for Amazon QuickSight starts at $9.00 per user, per month – one-tenth the cost of traditional BI solutions – so customers of all sizes can make rich business analytics functionality available to all of their employees.
The volume of data businesses create and process is growing every day. To get the most value out of this data, customers need to make it easy for all employees, regardless of their technical skill, to analyze data and share insights with others to drive decisions. However, the cost and complexity of traditional BI solutions prohibit most companies from making analytics ubiquitous across their organizations because these solutions require investments in costly on-premises hardware and software, weeks or months of data engineering time to build complex data models, and ongoing investments in additional infrastructure to maintain fast query performance as data sets grow. Amazon QuickSight is built from the ground up to solve these problems by bringing the scale and flexibility of the AWS Cloud to business analytics. Getting started with Amazon QuickSight is simple and fast. Customers simply log in to Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon QuickSight automatically discovers their data stored in AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon QuickSight also connects to third-party data sources such as Microsoft Excel or Salesforce.com. Amazon QuickSight formats the data and moves it to SPICE so it can be visualized in Amazon QuickSight, and customers can choose to keep the data in SPICE up-to-date as the data in the underlying sources change.
“Amazon QuickSight makes business analytics much easier, more accessible, cost effective, and faster than ever before,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Database Services, Amazon Web Services. “Because so many companies store data in AWS, it’s very appealing to these customers that Amazon QuickSight can automatically discover their data in AWS, move it to SPICE, and return query results so quickly – all for one-tenth the cost of traditional BI solutions.”
Built from the ground up for the cloud, SPICE uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations, and machine code generation to allow users to run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses – even with thousands of users all simultaneously performing interactive analysis across a wide variety of AWS data sources. As users explore their data, Amazon QuickSight infers data types and relationships, issues optimal queries to extract relevant data, aggregates the results in the SPICE engine, and provides suggestions for the best possible visualizations of the data – from bar and line graphs to pie charts and scatter plots or heat maps and pivot tables.
MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) is a leader in digital media and content infrastructure, powering an ever-growing number of massively popular media and entertainment properties. “We have been using the preview version of Amazon QuickSight to get insights into our digital content business,” said Brandon SanGiovanni, Traffic Manager, MLBAM. “Amazon QuickSight and the SPICE engine allowed us to tear down and explore our data in a fraction of the time we expected, making it easy for us to tap into the value inside our data. Amazon QuickSight made it easy to slice and dice our data by simply pointing Amazon QuickSight to our AWS data sources. With just a few clicks, Amazon QuickSight provided us with a real-time, 360-degree view of our business without being constrained by pre-built dashboard and metrics, which allowed us to expand our use of data to make informed decisions regarding our products.”
Edmunds.com is a leader and one-stop resource for automotive information online, and provides everything from prices for new and used vehicles, vehicle reviews, and true cost of ownership to tips and advice for car purchases. “At Edmunds.com, we have large amounts of data generated every single day in AWS, from website clickstream logs, vehicle transaction and inventory data, and third party datasets to our server and infrastructure logs,” said, Ajit Zadgaonkar, Head of Cloud Infrastructure, Edmunds.com. “Today, we use various tools to generate reports for the entire organization. However, there’s an increasing need to equip our business users with the ability to do their own ad-hoc data discovery and analytics to complement our centralized reporting. We are excited that Amazon QuickSight supports this self-service use case very well. Now that it is generally available, we’re looking forward to giving access to Amazon QuickSight to all of our business users because of its ease-of-use, fast analytics, deep integration with AWS data sources, and affordable price point.”
Infor provides business applications specialized by industry and built for the cloud, to its more than 90,000 customers and 66 million cloud users. “We have been using Amazon QuickSight during preview to analyze large datasets from our customers and we are excited about the speed of SPICE and the ease of use of Amazon QuickSight,” said Steve Stahl, Senior BI Development Manager, Infor. “Amazon QuickSight’s SPICE engine is very fast and lets us quickly process these datasets and visualize the results while greatly simplifying integration with Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift.”
Hotelbeds is a global distributor of accommodations serving more than 185 destination countries worldwide and more than 25 million room nights annually. “Hotelbeds’ platform that connects travel partners around the world is built on top of AWS and generates massive amounts of data every day, but our existing BI solution limits how we make these data and insights available to our business users,”said Miguel Iza, Head of Data and Analytics, Hotelbeds. “Amazon QuickSight is the ideal service to make this data available to our business users. After testing this new service in preview, we found Amazon QuickSight to offer great performance with its SPICE engine, and an easy-to-use user experience when it comes to analytics. Amazon QuickSight simplifies the way our users access their data, perform self-service analysis, and share insights with others. We plan to adopt Amazon QuickSight for our new data solutions and look forward to Amazon QuickSight democratizing business analytics in our company.”
Amazon QuickSight is free for one user and one GB of SPICE capacity. The Standard Edition of Amazon QuickSight starts at $9 per user per month, includes 10 GB of SPICE capacity, and is now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) and will expand to additional Regions in the coming months. The Enterprise Edition of Amazon QuickSight includes all Standard Edition features as well as support for Active Directory integration and encryption at rest and will be available in the coming weeks.
